Germany was burning. By late 1944, the British and
American air forces had achieved air superiority over the heart of the Third
Reich.[1] One by one, Germany’s major cities were subject to massive bombardments from huge numbers of heavy,
four-engine bombers. City centers were gutted, and millions left homeless,
while strategic targets such as factories, transportation centers, and oil
production sites were repeatedly hammered. The once vaunted Luftwaffe, which
had ushered in a new age of aerial terror with their bombing of Guernica, had been slowly ground away. Earlier in the war, they had been able to
successfully defend much of Germany from the allied bombers, but years of
fighting had sapped its strength and wiped out its experienced pilots. They
were but a shadow of their former power, helpless to halt the streams of
bombers nightly setting the fatherland aflame.

The thousand-year Reich, with its dreams of the
ascendancy of blood and soil, was collapsing from all sides. In this hour of
increasing desperation Adolf Hitler still clung to hope; he believed that
advanced new technologies would turn the tide of war, while the alliance
between the western capitalists and eastern communists would crumble in the
face of renewed German offensives. The Type XXI submarine would renew the Battle of the Atlantic, while the V2 Rocket would burn London or Antwerp to the ground.[2] The
skies would need to be retaken, and new fighters, such as the jet-powered
ME-262, were built to bring down the British Lancasters and American Flying
Fortresses. One fighter design was the Zeppelin Rammer, a diminutive rocket
powered glider.[3] After firing its small
payload of anti-air rockets, the Rammer’s true design was to come into play:
with its high speed and the leading edges of its wings reinforced and
sharpened, it was supposed to physically attack the tails of enemy aircraft -
the Rammer was a rocket-powered sword-plane.

This bizarre design, though never put into production,
can serve as a personification of the Nazi regime. Equipped with advanced
technology, in the form of high-powered propulsion and attack rockets, the
plane was on the cutting edge of design. Nevertheless, with its sharpened
sword-wings, the plane harkens back to an age of blades and bayonet charges.
This marriage between technology and anachronism, between modernity and
romanticism, is one of the most confusing aspects of the Nazi philosophy.
Though the Nazis may have had futuristic technology, highways, and automobiles,
though Hitler spoke to the German people using the airplane and the radio, the
Nazis also called for a return to blood and soil, to the pastoral romanticism
of the pre-modern world. Though a simple question can be phrased - “was the Nazi
regime modernist or anti-modernist?” – there is no simple answer to satisfy it.
After over half a century of debate among historians and sociologists, this
question is still open and has yet to be fully settled, though a general trend
towards a more modernist interpretation can be found.

One of the first books to broach the subject was
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Modern Enlightenment.
Written during the Second World War, and published shortly thereafter, the book
is the fundamental work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Adorno and
Horkheimer explore what they perceive as the failure of the enlightenment: how
is it that societies that internalized the values of the enlightenment could
somehow arrive at Auschwitz? They argue that from the very beginning of the
enlightenment, from the inception of modernity, forces inherent to the
enlightenment began to reverse its changes, leading in time to its destruction.
Though the modern age was supposed to be the apogee of reason, it would instead
lead to its nadir. This was due to the irrational roots of the enlightenment,
which can be traced back to man’s mythical past – “Myth is already
enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”[4] The
brutal, anti-intellectual, and anti-rational Nazi Regime was the culmination of
the modern era, with the furnaces of Auschwitz at its summit – “The wholly
enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”[5]
Though Adorno and Horkheimer make a powerful argument, Dialectic does
not substantiate its claims; is a work of philosophy rather than history.
Nevertheless, it did establish the perception of the Nazi regime as highly
modernist. Adorno and Horkheimer did present a plausible answer to the question
of Nazi modernity, yet it was a deeply upsetting one, for it directly blamed
the modern world that stemmed from the enlightenment for the Holocaust,
seemingly discrediting hundreds of years of human advancement.

An entirely different picture of the Nazi regime is
painted by Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler. Written shortly
after the war and published in 1947, the book is now generally considered quite
dated, as Trevor-Roper did not have access to numerous sources and archives
that are now available. Nevertheless, the work still stands as a source of much
common knowledge about the dying days of the Third Reich.

Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, Trevor-Roper argues
that the Nazi regime was decidedly anti-modern. Rather than being the
culmination of the enlightenment, Hitler and his thugs were a throwback to a
more barbaric time. Hitler did not attempt to create a new German order or
usher in the dawn of modern age, instead “his ultimate purpose was indeed clear
to those who did not willingly deceive themselves: he aimed at the destruction
of European civilization by a barbarian empire in central Europe, - the
terrible hegemony of a new, more permanent Genghiz Khan.”[6]
Throughout Last Days, Trevor-Roper uses anachronistic terms to describe
the Nazi regime: Hitler did not rule with a government, but with the court of
an “oriental sultanate;[7] Nazism is not a philosophy
or political platform, but rather “the religion of the German revolution,” a
“vast system of bestial Nordic nonsense;”[8] Himmler was not a general
or administrator, but rather “the high priest of the S.S;”[9]
Hitler’s whole court was “a set of monkeys.”[10]

The few possible elements of modernity that may have
existed were but figments in Trevor-Roper’s eyes. Although Hitler may have used
“perverted science” to help achieve his goals, his regime was specifically
anti-technocratic: “the decline of German science under the Nazis has become
apparent.”[11] Even military science
suffered due to the overwhelming authority of a single Fuhrer – “Hitler began
the war the a group of generals trained to uniform efficiency in the greatest
military tradition in the world; he ended it with a handful of obedient
nonentities, and himself.”[12] The German nation had
become led by a group of barbarians, who pillaged and burned their way across Europe before being themselves crushed.

Clearly there is a sharp contrast between Adorno and
Horkheimer’s belief in Nazism as enlightenment ascendant, and Trevor-Roper’s
view of Nazism as resurgent barbarism, yet the dissimilarity of these two
arguments was not seriously considered for almost two decades. The publication
of Society and Democracy in Germany quickly led to a revolution in
conceptualization of Nazi modernity. Written in 1964 by Ralf Dahrendorf, the
work is an attempt to answer the “German Question” which he views as “why is it
that so few in Germany embraced the principle of liberal democracy?”[13]
Dahrendorf argues that the peculiar nature of German industrialization caused
the nation to have an industrial revolution without developing associated
liberal political and social institutions. Thus, when the Third Reich arose, Germany was still predominantly pre-modern in character. Rather than viewing the Nazis as a
step backwards, he instead argues: “National Socialism completed for Germany the social revolution that was lost in the faultings of Imperial Germany and held up by the
contradictions of the Weimar Republic. The substance of this Revolution is
modernity.”[14]

However, the social revolution towards modernity was
not the original intent of the Nazis, and the push to modernity was a reluctant
one. It grew out of the need for the party to secure their power base. Only by
destroying the traditional authorities of Germany could the Nazi party affirm
their existence. The Nazi party had to “break the traditional and in effect
anti-liberal loyalties for region and religion, family and corporation, in
order to realize their claim to total power. Hitler needed modernity, little as
he liked it.”[15] Though the National
Socialist revolution was totalitarian, it had to “create the basis for liberal
modernity”[16] in order to succeed.
Commensurately, resistance to National Socialism constituted a reactionary
counter-revolution. Thus, the regime was neither directly modern nor
anti-modern, but rather included aspects of both. However, Dahrendorf’s
analysis, though groundbreaking, was brief, only a single chapter in a larger
work. He himself declared that “the social history of National Socialist
Germany had not yet been written.”[17]

David Schoenbaum’s Hitler’s Social Revolution:
Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939, published in1966,
fulfilled Dahrendorf’s request for a more comprehensive work. Schoenbaum sought
to explore the “impact of National Socialism not on German thought or
statecraft, but on German society.”[18] Rather than perceiving the
National Socialist revolution as being modern or anti-modern, Schoenbaum’s
thesis built on Dahrendorf’s more nuanced approach by advocating a “double
revolution.” He perceived the Nazi revolution as having two disparate pieces:

It was at the
same time a revolution of means and ends. The revolution of ends was
ideological – war against bourgeois and industrial society. The revolution of
means was its reciprocal. It was bourgeois since, in an industrial age, even a
war against industrial society must be fought with industrial means and
bourgeois are necessary to fight the bourgeoisies.[19]

Schoenbaum highlights the socialist aspects of
National Socialism, arguing that the Nazi regime did initially advocate for the
elimination of class divisions and the creation of a volksgemineschaft
(people’s community). It did so by attempting to return to a romanticized past,
one that would “make the German speaking world safe for small business, small
farmers, and small-towners.”[20] But, the Nazi regime was
not only concerned with social aspirations; political goals, such as
overturning the Treaty of Versailles and securing Lebensraum were
paramount. According to Schoenbaum, herein lies the contradiction: “the threat
of force in an industrial age presupposed industry.”[21] If
the Nazi regime was able to turn back the clock and return Germany to some sort of utopian, pre-modern age, they would not have the military and technological
might to carry out their crusade in the east. The Nazi regime was thus
schizophrenic, looking backwards and forwards at the same time. Each half of
the double revolution followed one of these two paths. Their social revolution
against industrialized society was clearly anti-modern, but the end result, the
revolution of means, was increased modernization. Thus, although the Nazi
regime initially called for the “revision of the tyranny of big industry, big
cities, big unions, big banks,”[22] “ in 1939 the cities were
larger, not smaller; the concentration of capital greater than before; the rural
population reduced, not increased.”[23] Nazi Germany attempted to
use the tools of industrialized society to destroy industrialized society, and
in the end, “destruction was all that was left.”[24]

Schoenbaum’s double revolution hypothesis is able to
at last present a plausible answer to the question of Nazi modernity, as it
incorporates both the technological and reactionary aspects of the regime’s
character. Yet rather than stifle debate on the subject, Hitler’s Social
Revolution served to increase the amount of discourse. Written in 1971
Richard Grunberger’s the Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany
1933-1943, covers the same field of information as Schoenbaum’s work, and
is presented in the same format, with each chapter dedicated to one particular
facet of life in the Third Reich. However, Grunberger’s book presents yet
another theory of modernity.

The Nazi regime was simply a continuation of many of
the anti-enlightenment and pro-authoritarian trends that had already been
present in German society. There was no social revolution, only the appearance
of one, specifically crafted to dupe the masses; “they used the slogan of
revolution to divert attention from the realities of political continuity and
slacked anti-capitalist yearnings with a diet of pseudo-social change: Jews
were attacked as the embodiment of capitalism.”[25]
However, actual capitalist structures were never destroyed and no
anti-capitalist policy ever implemented, as this would have undermined the
capacity of the regime to exercise international power, which was its true
goal. Though the Nazis had preached about the necessity of blood and soil,
“schemes of rural resettlement...accorded ill with the Nazis’ overriding aim,
which was to revise the Versailles Treaty.”[26] The same process that took
place in the field was occurring in the factories. The demands and needs of big
business won out over those of the small business or the workers. Though the
Nazis had preached about a return to the pre-industrial good old days, they
were more than willing to discard the artisan for the heavy industrialist.

Though this argument appears to be similar to
Schoenbaum’s thesis, there are two critical differences. Firstly, Grunberger
rejects the notion that there was any sort of revolution associated with the
Nazi rise to power. Secondly, while Schoenbaum wrote that there was a conflict
between modernism and anti-modernism within the Nazi regime, Grunberger sees
only the trappings of anti-modernism, rather than a serious attempt at
anti-modernist policy that had a paradoxical effect. Nazism was not a break
with the continuity of gradual modernization within German history, but rather
a continuation of it.

The impact of Schoenbaum’s double revolution theory
continued to influence historians examining the Nazi regime. A direct line of
effect can be drawn between Hitler’s Social Revolution and the next
influential work in the development of the question of modernity. Detlev
Peukert’s 1982 book Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism
in Everyday Life, had a profound impact on the study of the Third Reich.
Rather than focusing on political or economic questions, or the lives of the
Nazi elite, Peukert instead examined the everyday experiences of life within
the Nazi regime. This approach, which was novel at the time, afforded him new
opportunities and angles with which to study the regime.

Schoenbaum’s influence is visible throughout the
work, as Peukert takes every opportunity to explore the modernity or
anti-modernity of the regime. Peukert argues that the Nazi system exhibited
elements of both fields, oftentimes conflicting with its own goals and
rhetoric. Though the Nazis claimed to support the interests of small farmers,
championing the importance of blood and soil, they also desired to increase
crop yields. Their agricultural policy was conflicted between the “ideological
promotion of the peasantry and soil, as reflected particularly in the Reich
Hereditary Farm Property Law of 1933, and campaigns to increase agricultural
output (such as the annual battles for production), which inevitably led to
preferential treatment being given to efficient concerns.”[27]
Meanwhile, white-collar workers were affected by their own set of conflicting
facts; though the regime railed about the evil of cities, they “sketched a plan
for society in which industry and technology, and hence engineers and other
technical workers, would play a central role.”[28] The conflict inherent in
this position is apparent, yet somehow the regime was able to embrace modernity
and romanticism concurrently.

Though the Nazis advocated a return to the pre-modern
world, the end result of much of their social policy was to erode preexisting
structures and replace them with nazified equivalents. Peukert identifies this
trend as actually speeding the modernization of Germany rather than halting or
reversing it, giving “further impetus to the secular modernizing trend.”[29] For
example, the Hitler Youth was supposed to “enforce the restoration of the
system of order and authority threatened by modern mass society;”[30] but
this new source of authority conflicted with the traditional role of parents
and their influence over their children, and thus served to begin destabilizing
it.

Peukert does not advocate the idea that the Third
Reich was a “brown revolution” or a “thrust towards modernization.”[31]
Rather, the regime merely continued the existing trends within industry and
science towards increasing production and rationalization. Yet, their social
policy was ostensibly highly reactionary, calling for a return to a
romanticized past. Here Peukert cites Schoenbaum directly, arguing that the
regime was “reactionary in its goals, but revolutionary in its methods.”[32]
These revolutionary methods served to work against the desired outcome, as the
method is - in part - the message.

Peukert, however, is quick to point out that there
were still some aspects of the regime that were decidedly anti-modern and not
affected by the more general trend towards modernization. Notably, the use of
slave labor, racism, and outright terror anchor parts of the regime in a
pre-modern world:

The social
realities of the Third Reich, then involved these two aspects simultaneously:
the dawning of the new achievement-oriented consumer society based on the
nuclear family, upward mobility, mass media, leisure and an interventionist
welfare state (though much of this still lay in the realms of propaganda and
had not yet come into being); and the encroaching shadows cast by a project of
social order based on racialist doctrines and terror.[33]

Thus, in addition to Schoenbaum’s double revolution,
there also existed elements of Trevor-Roper’s barbarity in Peukert’s answer to
the question of Nazi modernity.

As more historians developed theories on Nazi
modernity, the answers have become increasingly complex. From simple modern or
anti-modern, the status quo shifted to a double revolution of modern and
anti-modern simultaneously and then to Peukert’s perception of a double
revolution with attached elements of anti-modernism from another source. If
this trend continued, the historical debate would have collapsed under the
sheer weight of increasingly nuanced descriptions that moved farther and
farther away from any readability or usefulness. Fortunately, a new theory was
presented that combined the disparate elements into one single idea:
reactionary modernism.

This theory was first promulgated by Jeffrey Herf in
his aptly titled 1984 book, Reactionary Modernism. From the very first
pages of the book he clearly states his thesis: “an important current within
conservative and subsequently Nazi ideology was a reconciliation between the
antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism
and the most obvious manifestation of means-ends rationality, that is, modern
technology.”[34] Rather than perceiving the
modernist and anti- modernist behaviors and values of the conservatives and the
Nazis as stemming from two disparate sources that competed with other another,
as Schoenbaum did, Herf argues that these two forces became enmeshed within one
another. The technology of the modern world was separated from modernist,
enlightenment values and became associated, not with western Zivilisaiton,
but with German Kultur.

To support this thesis, Herf relies on the theories of
intellectual writers from Weimar and Nazi Germany, as well as essays in
technical and engineering journals. He identifies the reactionary modernist
trend within their work that sought to teach “the German Right to speak of
technology and culture,”[35] rather than technology or
culture. Again, this rejection of enlightenment values but embrace of modern
technology is paradoxical. However, as a rejection of technology would only
lead to “national impotence,” the nationalist and conservative forces within Germany engaged in a rapprochement with modern technology. It was to be, in the words of
Joseph Goebbels “the century of stählernde Romantik, steellike
romanticism.”[36]

In contrast to Schoenbaum, who argued that the double
revolution saw no value in technology and was only using it to overthrow modern
society, Herf believes that the conservative nationalists became ideologically
enamored with technology. There was a “strong push to modernity or at least to
certain aspects of modern society... but not at the expense of Nazi ideology.”[37]
Similarly, Herf also rejected Adorno and Horkheimer’s belief in Auschwitz as the pinnacle of modernity, instead arguing that National Socialism grew out of
the lack of enlightenment values rather than their fulfillment: “the unique
combination of industrial development and a weak liberal tradition was the
social background for reactionary modernism.”[38]

Reactionary modernism can be characterized by several
elements: the importance of technology and technical innovation; rejection of
natural science; the centrality of Volk, community, and blood, that is
nationalism; irrationalism; and a rejection of both capitalism and Marxism. To
this idea the Nazis welded anti-Semitism, and commensurately Jews were attacked
as both dangerous elements of the future and the past, as both bolshevists and
bankers. To the reactionary modernist, the Autobahnen was not a symbol
of the destruction of the nature, but rather coexistent with it; as the roads
wove through the German countryside they united a Volk and preserved the
beauty of the landscape. “Building these ‘highways bound to the land’ (landschaftsverbundene
Strassen) and saving the German soul were mutually reinforcing projects.”[39] The
Nazi embrace of technology was a third path, one that rejected both the capitalist
and Marxist views of the modern world. By uniting technology with Volk
and blood, the reactionary modernists were able to create the idea that
“technology was a biological rather than an economic phenomenon.”[40] Thus
the Nazi approach to modernity and technology “built on German racial
foundations to ward of the threats from both capitalism and socialism.”[41]

This new emphasis on technological salvation would
display its full effect during the second half of World War II. Hitler and some
members of his court still believed that German technology - filled with the
spirit of the Volk - would reverse the course of the war, even as Soviet
artillery shells were bursting around them. Herf identifies this as symbolic of
the irrationalism inherent in the reactionary modernist ideology: “Reactionary
modernists contributed...to the primacy of Nazi ideology and politics over
technical rationality and means-end calculation of the national interest up to
the end of the Hitler regime.”[42] Though the regime embraced
the power of technology, the irrationalism inherent within reactionary
modernism led to a breakdown within the creation of new technological power.
Huge amounts of resources were poured into the V1 and V2 rocket programs,
despite their negligible ability to affect either strategic or tactical
concerns, while real theoretical advancements, such as atomic weapons, were
relegated to the sideshow. The V1 and V2 “were to be the wonder-weapons that
would reverse the course of the war and demonstrate that the German racial soul
could compensate for quantitative (an in many cases qualitative)
inferiorities.”[43]

By 1945, the notion that any technological advance
could stop the Red Army, the British and American forces, or the bomber streams
is simply ludicrous. “Had the Nazis been committed Luddites, they would not
have been able to start World War II. Had they been cynical, calculating
technocrats, they might have won a more limited victory, or at the very least
avoided catastrophic defeat.”[44] Instead, they were
reactionary modernists, and Germany burned because of it.

Although significant research has been performed into
the nature of Nazi modernity, some historians have begun questioning the
validity of the entire endeavor. No less an authority than Ian Kershaw, perhaps
the foremost scholar on Adolf Hitler, has refuted the entire field. In The
Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives of Interpretation, first
published in 1985, Kershaw directly challenges the previously held
interpretations. He rejects Dahrendorf’s and Schoenbaum’s analysis of the
regime, arguing that there was no social revolution to speak of, and
interpretations that led to that conclusion are “largely attributable to an
over-ready acceptance of the regime’s own pseudo-egalitarian propaganda and
exaggerated claims, and partly too, to actual social changes of the post-war
era which were often projected backwards into the

Third Reich, though they had little to do with
Nazism, even indirectly.”[45] The regime was not
attempting to reshape German society beyond the creation of a new racial
identity, which was, in part, used to blunt disappointment at the failure to
fulfill the promised social revolution that was halted by the murder of Ernst
Röhm, the leader of the SA, during the Night of the Long Knives.

According to Kershaw, the character of the regime was
not revolutionary: “Hitler was uninterested in tampering with the social
order.”[46] Kershaw argues the Nazi
social policy was not attempting to reshape German society: “the idea of the
national community was not a basis for changing social structures, but a symbol
of transformed consciousness.”[47] Attempts to reshape the
social fabric of Germany by destroying industry or capitalist structures were
simply nonexistent; these would have been tantamount to international suicide.
There was no double revolution of romanticism that led to modernity. Family,
church, and class structures were not broken down or significantly changed.
Thus, Kershaw argues, “it seems clear then, that Nazism did not produce a
social revolution in Germany during the Third Reich.”[48]
Similarly, he argues against the notion of Nazism representing a backwards and
reactionary movement seeking to overthrow the modern world. While Nazism may
have included some forms of romanticism, they “served as propagandistic symbols
or ideological cover for wholly modern types of appeal.”[49]

Kershaw’s interpretation of the Nazi regime emphasizes
continuity over change. There was no dramatic shift either in attempted
behavior or outcome that led to either a backwards or futurist stance. Any
social change that did occur “was simply that of an advanced capitalist
economy, if one with an unusual degree of state intervention.”[50]
Kershaw rejected the entire notion of using modernity to explore the Nazi
regime, stating, “in evaluating the brief era of the Dictatorship itself, the
modernization concept is unhelpful.”[51] The twelve year period of
Nazi rule was but “a flash in time,”[52] one part of Germany’s long
and gradual shift towards modernity, which had already begun before the Nazis
came to power and continued on after they were defeated.

Despite Kershaw’s protests, the use of modernity to
study the Nazi regime has not abated. Rather, new works are still being written
about the phenomenon and old theories revisited. One of these, Zygmunt Bauman’s
Modernity and the Holocaust, published in 1989, returns to one of the
first studies in the field. Bauman, a sociologist having written at length
about the nature of modern and post-modern society, echoes the words of Adorno
and Horkheimer four decades prior, as he explores the relationship between Auschwitz and the modern world. Like his predecessors, Bauman argues that “the Holocaust
was not the antithesis of modern civilization,”[53] but
rather it was “fully in keeping with everything we know about our
civilization.”[54]

In his examination, Bauman finds the necessary elements
for the Holocaust stemming from the modern world. Auschwitz was literally a
factory of death, taking in raw materials and producing a product in a
mechanized fashion. Only a bureaucratic state could attempt to organize and
carry out such a massive endeavor, and in the end the Holocaust was
administered as any other state project. Rather than being barbarous, the
destruction of the European Jews was carried out in a highly rational fashion.
It was a calculated program designed to achieve a set goal, the removal of the
Jews from Europe, with the highest chance of success and lowest cost. The
Holocaust was carried out with “co-operation between various departments of
state bureaucracy; of careful planning, designing proper technology and
technical equipment, budgeting, calculating and mobilizing necessary resources:
indeed the matter of dull bureaucratic routine.”[55]
Simply put, “the Holocaust...was clearly unthinkable without such bureaucracy.”[56]

Bauman does break with Adorno and Horkheimer in one
important manner. He does not view modern society as necessarily leading to the
Holocaust; his words are not meant to suggest that bureaucracy inevitably leads
to Auschwitz. Unlike the prior authors, Bauman’s modern world is not “radiant
with triumphant calamity,”[57] rather it is but a
necessary factor in allowing the Holocaust to occur. Nevertheless, both groups
of authors clearly associate the Nazi regime with a high degree of modernity.

This general trend towards a more modernist view of
Nazism is mirrored in research that investigates the links between the Third
Reich and technology. Science, Technology and National Socialism,
published in 1994, is one of the foremost works in the field. Rather than
focusing on narrow topics, such as the oft-studied German atomic bomb project,
the authors cover a wide swath of subjects relating to the area of study.
Through their research, they are able to show that technology and technocracy
were increasingly important sections of the Third Reich: “by the end of the war
and the ‘Thousand Year Reich,’ technocracy – and with it science and
engineering – was emerging as one of the most powerful and last pillars of the National Socialist State.”[58] This is not to say that
the Nazi regime was directly modernist, but rather their embrace of technology
was a continuation of the “growing trend towards technocracy, both before and
after 1933.”[59] However, there was one
particularly novel interaction between technology and Nazism: “the use of
rational means and technocratic principles to achieve both rational and
irrational ends. In other words, technocratic methods were decoupled from
technocratic goals.”[60] This argument falls
squarely in line with Herf’s reactionary modernism – technology itself was
embraced, but not the values that normally coexist with it.

In recent years, a new angle of research had begun
exploring modern or anti-modern aspects of the Third Reich. How Green Were
the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, published in
2005, explores the complicated field of Nazi environmentalism. Green movements
are in themselves an amalgam of modernist and anti-modernist tendencies – from
desires to “return to nature” and regress back to a pastoral existence to
scientific and rational arguments for conservation and resource management.
Thus, they provide an excellent opportunity to explore these forces at work in
the Third Reich. The authors examine the paradox between Nazi rhetoric, which championed
the national landscape as synonymous with the German soul and Nazi policy,
which in actuality did little to preserve the national landscape. If in the
Nazi mindset “Germany’s mountains, meadows, and rivers bore the peculiar
imprint of German history, German culture, and German tastes”[61], if
“Blood and Soil” was central to Nazi policy, then how is it that they chopped
down significant portions of Germany’s sacred forests?

The conservationist movement within Nazi Germany at
no time overshadowed the regime’s international goals. Although the “eternal
forest” was seen as a source of the German Volk, “Hitler’s
military-industrial machine...consumed Germany’s timber reserves just as it
consumed those elsewhere in Europe.”[62] Even though the Nazis may
have enacted conversationalist legislation, notably the Reich Nature Protection
law of 1935, it was “mostly honored in the breach once war preparations came to
dominate policy.”[63] Like much of the party’s
anti-modernist rhetoric, romantic attachment to Germany’s landscape was but
another tool of propaganda to be used or ignored as more important situations
demanded.

Significant amounts of research have investigated the
question of Nazi modernity. While a satisfying conclusion has yet to be
reached, a broad research trend can be found within the past half-century of
study. Generally, it appears that the conception of the Nazi movement has moved
away from an anti-modernist stance and towards a more modernist perspective.
However, Nazism was not a push to modernity, but rather a continuation of more
general modernizing trends inherent in industrialized society, perhaps
accelerated by the potential power of modern technology in both propaganda and
warfare. Thus, there is a progression from Trevor-Roper’s Nazi barbarity to
Schoenbaum’s double revolution, to Herf’s reactionary modernism, to Kershaw’s
focus on continuity over change.

One powerful example of this shift in perspective can
be seen through the attitudes towards Nazi technology. Trevor-Roper described
the “decline of German science under the Nazis,”[64] Herf
spoke of a technocratic but irrational regime, and Science, Technology, and
National Socialism argued that sections of the regime were indeed quite
advanced – “the German Army rocket program was one of the first examples of
state mobilization of massive engineering and scientific resources for the
forced invention of a radical, new military technology.”[65]
Though the Nazis (thankfully) never constructed an atomic weapon, many of their
advances were groundbreaking. They developed wire-guided, anti-ship missiles
(famously used to cripple the battleship HMS Warspite), infrared night vision
systems for tanks, flying wing aircraft, and a multitude of other advances.
Many of these were never successfully deployed or were still in the testing
stages in 1945, but they nevertheless represent an incredible achievement of
engineering and science.[66]

Fundamentally, the question of Nazi modernity will
likely never be fully satisfied. It is an impossible question, for the terms
themselves are ill defined. Modernity is a highly complex topic that contains
within itself numerous potential debates and disagreements. Similarly, what
exactly is Nazism? Should the term refer to the Hitler’s original designs; Nazi
policy and laws; the dreams and aspirations of Nazi officials; or should it
examine end results? Nazism was not a single concept nor single event; rather,
it was millions of individual events and people, changing over time and
adapting to new situations. Depending on how one defines the terms Nazi and
modernity, different answers to the question can be reached. Historians must
remember, “Theory construction must not fly in the face of the empirical
historical facts.”[67] No matter what answer, if
any, is reached regarding the question of modernity, the Nazis spoke of blood
and soil and built guided missiles, while Germany and the rest of Europe burned.

[1]
For a general survey of the bombing of Germany in World War II see the chapter
“The Crescendo of Bombing” in Hart, B. H .Liddell. History of the Second
World War. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. For a more comprehensive
analysis, read Knell, Herman. To Destroy a City: StrategicBombing and its
Consequences in World War II. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003.

[2]
Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 763-764

[3]
The Rammer is briefly mentioned in Albrecht, Ulrich. “Military Technology and
National Socialist Ideology” in Science, Technology, and National Socialism,
ed Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994. For technical specifications see Johnson, Dan. luft46.com
http://www.luft46.com/misc/zrammer.html